A Pound of Flesh…

*

For what doth it profit a nation,

To gain the world,

But lose its land?

 

Cycles of Life…

*

Does the religious life require leisure,

or the idleness of the leisured class?

Certainly, those classes have always held work to be degrading.

*

It is easy to see why.

Modern labour, predominantly indoors and sedentary can educate one into disbelief.

The past two-hundred years have shown us how work in heavy industry

is wont to render refinements of the soul redundant.

*

A generation or two after any revolution of this sort

and the very term ‘religion’ elicits only a dull, uncomprehending stare.

*

But could there be a correlation between religious sentiment and the natural life?

Most traditional deities slot seamlessly into the seasonal round.

And work in this realm serves to remind one of the greater cycles that govern existence.

One of which, it may be argued, is… religion.

 

 

 

Fruits of Balance…

*

… “‘Greater’ is just as perplexing as ‘space’ and ‘colour’.”

“It contains the concept of consumption.”

“Yet, is not necessarily overjoyed at the idea.”

“Perhaps it is just issuing a friendly warning.”

*

*

“Whichever way we look at it, natural hierarchies involve predation.”

“Why, even space gets in on it.”

“Look at how the sky swallows a bird.”

“That is merely an illusion of distance.”

*

Game of Bones…

*

With what gusto the horizons of our world expand.

Our enthusiasm grasps at each new enigma like a child its toy.

Perhaps one day the most solemn problems of the past

will appear as mere playthings to us…

The plight of the poor.

Souless wealth.

Our treatment of animal species.

Man’s inhumanity to man.

Perhaps ‘Old Man’ will then look for new problems to amuse himself.

Distance…

 

*

If we want a yardstick,

for how far we have travelled from our Gods…

We need only consider the once widespread custom

of sacrificing a first-born child…

It hardly seems credible from this vantage,

irrespective of its counter productivity in an era of high infant-mortality.

What can these religions have been thinking?

That God was greater than mankind?

Heaven forbid!

Dragon’s Eye…

*

… The hollow of Dragon Hill affords a stunning vista of the Manger and the Giant’s Stairs.

From this vantage the sheer scale of the site starts to impinge upon my consciousness.

I concur with Wen that the laity would have congregated in the bowl or chalice of the hill where we now stand, shaped as it is it forms a natural amphitheatre and the scoured grass beneath our feet which according to tradition is the spot where St. George ‘loosed the Dragon’s blood’ is clearly as anything a missing piece off the horse on the hill opposite.

I am minded of the myth of Isis and Osiris and the search of the Goddess for her brother’s dismembered body…

The other disconcerting thing, from our point of view, is that the figure is not wholly visible from this elevation.

One would need to be a lot higher up or further back to make out the entire shape.

It is though, nevertheless, a highly dramatic landscape.

We have crossed to the opposite hill now and stand contemplating the eye of the dragon…

*

Signatures…

*

Back in the low slung car I stare into the gloom.

A quiet has descended with the mist.

It is the silence that preludes any portentous event.

The car lurches and veers suddenly and we bounce up a dirt track and skid to a halt at the foot of Dragon Hill.

“You didn’t mean to come this way did you?”

“This way, that way…what does it matter?”

“Who knows?”

It is my turn to look mysterious as we set off up the hillock.

The chill snags my breath as we climb and the mist swirls and eddies, clinging to our legs and arms like star stuff.

I nearly lose my balance a number of times for no apparent reason, a sure sign if one were needed that we are approaching the numinous…

*

Albion…

*

…And then we come across the church.

Cue mass excitement as we take in all the
Giants, which appear to sprout from every orifice…

The body of the church you see is an education in itself.

You probably already know about consecrated ground and unconsecrated ground.

It is the Inner and the Outer, pure and simple.

And this symbolism is carried into the structure of the building.

The gargoyles, the Sheila-na-Gigs, the Green Men, the Giants, the Dragons and the like, they are all on the outside of the church building.

They do not make it into the ‘ark’.

The inside is for all the saints and angels. Do you see? It is the same symbolism.

The Inner and the Outer.

*

…They do have something of the ‘otherworld’ about them these places.

Not so much Giant Hill itself perhaps although it may have been different had we gone into the Trendle.

It fact I am pretty damn sure it would have been different in the Trendle.

Wen was all for it… even with the helicopter buzzing us overhead. And her logic was very persuasive.

‘No unauthorised person beyond this point,’ said the sign.

‘But we are more authorised than anyone ever could be,’ said Wen.

It is difficult to disagree but then the village of Cerne Abbas is in itself quite otherworldly too.

I got exactly the same feel from it as when I first went to Glastonbury.

It felt like we had left England and gone abroad, perhaps to France…

‘Albion!’ smiles Wen, ‘The whole of these Blessed Isles used to feel like this…’

Excerpt – The Heart of Albion by Stuart France and Sue Vincent

Others like us…

*

… ‘Remind me again, why we are going to Cadbury?’

Part of my reluctance for these, what might be called, impromptu assignations are the inevitable ruptures they make in the overall scheme of things.

Once a pattern has started to form it is somewhat disconcerting to have to unravel it all or even to amend it slightly to accommodate the new strand and even though I know that it is good for the flexibility of the mind and really what we should be doing all of the time it is still an effort and as such is ripe for avoidance if at all possible.

Plus the fact that it is another hill.

On a very hot day!

*

…Still, as we make our way out of the car-park and look up there does not appear to be much of a hill left to climb.

The Silver-Bullet, bless her aerodynamically modified sides, has already taken us up most of the height.

There is, though, a plague of gnats playing along an extended stretch of the tree tunnel which leads up to the hill-top.

Wen and I both turn our back on them which allows us to see the advertisement for the nearby pub which has been strategically placed for those descending the height.

‘Still looking for the castle?’

‘At least that’s lunch taken care of,’ grins Wen.

The thought of lunch and an invisible castle revives me somewhat.

After all what we have here is another Uffington.

Looked at in those terms it is difficult to imagine anything I would rather be doing really, although I still somehow doubt that there will be anything as spectacular as Uffington at the end of this particular tunnel of trees… Interesting how indolence passes from the body to the mind like that.

The best way out of it is to move and to move quickly so I put on something of a spurt to reach the top and leave Wen trailing…

‘It’s the thought of beer and food which does that you know…’

*

…There is something otherworldly about walking up a hill, crossing that threshold between the heat of a summer sun and the cool green of the trees. Glimpses of a landscape that conforms to what we have come to know as sacred are seen through breaks in the gnarled trunks, squirrels scamper busily along the branches and the inevitable sound of birds accompanies each breath.

Beside the track steep banks rise, channelling our footsteps through a narrow passage, guarded by ancient sentinels, rooted in earth. As the trees thin and the shade gets left behind it is almost like pushing through a tangible veil as we emerge into the unprotected sunlight of the summit. Looking back, the tunnel of trees closes in verdant darkness behind us, shutting us off from the world we left some five hundred feet below.

A solitary figure stands upon the far bank… there are always three, it seems, somehow. Although I know he is only another walker…I see the glint of a spear and a cloak flapping in the non-existent breeze…

*

‘…Remind me again why we are going to Cerne Abbas intead of staying at Cadbury?’

Excerpt taken from, The Heart of Albion by Stuart France and Sue Vincent

World Views: Darwinism?

*

“Darwinian Natural Selection is all about the differential survival of replicators. There are various kinds of replicators of which genes are some and memes are others, and they engage  in a kind of tussle which each other to survive as replicators using vehicles  which are bodies and which are brains and which are all sorts of other artefacts…

Our separate genes, although we unite them together under one word, genome, are similar to viruses in that they are changing their partners in every generation and you can regard the whole genome as a massive collection of viruses, of independently tussling replicators who survive better because they go around together as a gang.”

–  Richard Dawkins

*

What to say about this? It is structural and mechanistic. It lacks an aesthetic. It mis-assigns ‘will’ as an insecure and immature accident of design. It might be better described as a World Speculation rather than a World View because the things with which it deals cannot be seen by the human eye but can only be posited by the human mind.  A ‘World Vision’, then? As a ‘World Vision’ it is heartless. Our vision of Charles Robert Darwin clambering aboard HMS Beagle, with all the mysteries of a Natural World before him, calling for exploration, is full to brimming with heart…